With increasing demands and decreasing budgets, these are challenging times for many IT professionals. Some savvy IT people, however, are growing their budgets and improving their careers by forging partnerships with business groups who can benefit most from IT’s expertise, and are willing to help pay for it.

Which business groups are most likely to team with IT? Actually, we asked the same question in our recent Business and IT Priority Survey, which queried 1800 business leaders across many VP and CXO roles, including finance, marketing, sales, strategy, human resources, diversity, operations, manufacturing, business development, and more.

Based on this global data, Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) are great potential partners, because while their priorities often align with IT, their budgets may not:

Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) Enterprise Module Introduced at Cisco Live MilanOn January 28 at Cisco Live Milan, Enterprise Networks introduced a new software-defined networking (SDN) solution that will change the way customers operate their networks, substantially reducing network complexity and amplifying network intelligence. With this announcement, Cisco is set to transform current IT to fast IT.The new Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) Enterprise Module automates network configuration and troubleshooting and enables IT managers to substantially reduce the time it takes to perform operational activities so they can better respond to new business opportunities. Through its open and programmable approach, the Cisco APIC Enterprise Module massively simplifies configuration, provisioning, policy enforcement, and compliance.The new Cisco APIC Enterprise Module was featured in the opening keynote at Cisco Live Milan on January 28, delivered by Rob Lloyd, president, development and sales, and was also introduced in its own webcast, which you can now watch on demand. Read More »

In the world of IT, we drive toward operational consistency for greater efficiency and improved security. If everything runs the same across all our locations, it’s much easier to train staff and manage the network. However, operational consistency may not provide the flexibility IT needs to keep up with ever changing business priorities that require IT to open offices or roll out new applications faster. For example, if a business wants to open a new office in a developing region, standard carrier services like MPLS can take months to provision, and cripple productivity unless alternative services can be quickly deployed. Likewise, IT may need to suspend services like guest WiFi if they are unable to protect mission-critical applications.

Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) is a solution that gives IT flexibility and control so they can quickly respond to new business requirements immediately. For example, IWAN allows IT the choice to run a hybrid network environment with consistent and easy-to-scale security, while providing IT control and automation capabilities to ensure the highest quality application experience for their users. Read More »

As business groups increase their technology investments and gain more access to new technologies and consumption models, IT’s balance between operational excellence and innovation is shifting. Technical innovation can now happen anywhere. This change presents a huge opportunity for IT to drive innovation in new ways. So which organizations are seizing this opportunity?

To find out, we recently conducted the Cisco Business and IT Priority Survey to determine how these groups manage innovation, and how their business and IT priorities are linked. See the info graphic and previous blog for global results and observations, and see how your priorities compare to your peers by taking the survey here.

As today’s innovation and technology investments can dramatically impact tomorrow’s business results, the investment levels by region are particularly interesting.

For example, 50% of business leaders in China see technology innovation as a critical differentiator to their business, whereas in the US, only 21% rank innovation as critical. Multiple times in the survey, the responses from China indicated a collective interest in innovation as a top business priority. In Germany, 23%, and the UK 25% of business leaders also see innovation as a business priority as critical.

Companies in India and China also indicate that their investments are growing faster than other regions’. About 81% of Indian business leaders surveyed, and 75% of Chinese ones expect their technology budgets to increase next year – many by more than 25%. By contrast, 54% of UK businesspeople, 48% in Canada and Germany, and only 41% in the US expect their technology budgets to grow.

Indian and Chinese business leaders also indicate that they’re spending a bigger proportion of their own growing budgets on technology. In China 82% of those surveyed plan to spend at least 25% of their business budgets on technology, and in India 71% are doing the same. By contrast, only 41% of US and 45% of Canadian business leaders are spending more than 25% of their budgets on technology. Read More »

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